I think you can already see an evolution around here with regard to this subject.

As I just posted the other day in this thread, there are additional materials, including legal materials/decisions etc, that I wish to bring into this ongoing conversation but to do so will require some time where I can bring undivided attention to it; this I do not have right now.

As words and articles became digitized over the last 15 years, they began to float, there for the plucking and replication elsewhere. Words like “curation” and “aggregation” became the language of the realm, sometimes used as substitutes for describing the actual creation of content. What had once been a craft was rapidly becoming a task. Traditional media organizations watched as others kidnapped their work, not only taking away content but, more and more, taking the audiences with them. Practitioners of the new order heard the complaints and suggested that mainstream media needed to quit whining and start competing in a changed world, where what’s yours may not be yours anymore if others find a better way to package it. So where is the line between promoting the good work of others and simply lifting it? Naughty aggregation is analogous to pornography: You know it when you see it. As custody of content becomes more tenuous, there’s a risk that we may end up passing around and putting topspin on fewer and fewer original works. This has created a growing sense of unease among both digital immigrants and natives that the end of “ownership” could eventually diminish the Web’s value. Two approaches to giving credit where credit belongs were announced at the South by Southwest Interactive festival here in Austin. In one instance, an ad hoc group is using a kind of trade association approach to articulate common standards. In the second, someone who makes a living by mining the Web is deploying symbols to create a common shorthand for attribution. Last July, Simon Dumenco wrote a column for Advertising Age noting that the death of Steve Jobs was competing for digital attention with the salacious story of Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman. Given that the piece was about what was trending on Twitter at that very moment, his column was immediately picked up by traffic-seekers like The Huffington Post and Techmeme. The Faustian bargain of the digital news ecosystem suggests that people get to pick your pocket a bit and then send back traffic in return. But Mr. Dumenco noticed that The Huffington Post, a huge site with many readers, returned very little traffic, while Techmeme, a much smaller site, kicked up plenty. He went on something of a rant about it, writing that The Huffington Post’s overly aggressive approach to aggregation at the time — in which content is rewritten, links are buried, and very little is added — yielded all of 57 page views for the original item. The Huffington Post suspended the writer involved and apologized to Mr. Dumenco. He responded by saying that the site was “singling out — indeed, scapegoating — a young writer for engaging in a style of aggregation long practiced, condoned and encouraged by Huffington Post editorial management.” After getting an in-box full of examples from other writers who felt similarly aggrieved, Mr. Dumenco decided to pull out the big guns: He has formed a committee aiming to establish standards for aggregation. Buckle up, here comes the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation. O.K., you can almost hear the digerati seizing with laughter at the idea that a pew full of journalism church ladies is somehow going to do battle with the entire Internet. But Mr. Dumenco compares his effort to the editorial rules promulgated by the American Society of Magazine Editors, which have come to shape how magazines distinguish editorial from advertising. It’s an imperfect system with a fair number of outliers, but over time the magazine group devised guidelines that had significant influence and at least set standards that people could argue about. An august list of names has signed on to the effort: David Granger, the editor in chief of Esquire; James Bennet, editor in chief of The Atlantic; and Adam Moss of New York magazine. Of course, all three oversee robust Web sites that do a fair amount of aggregating themselves. The committee includes digital media natives like Elizabeth Spiers, editor in chief of The New York Observer; Mark Armstrong, a founder of Longreads.com; and Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor in chief of Slate. All of them believe there is value in looking at what might be called best practices when it comes to linking, summarizing and aggregating. “This is not an anti-aggregation group, we are pro-aggregation,” Mr. Dumenco told me. “We want some simple, common-sense rules. There should be some kind of variation of the Golden Rule here, which is that you should aggregate others as you would wish to be aggregated yourself.” Kerry Lauerman is the editor in chief of Salon, a site that has been around since the dawn of the consumer Web and has been on both sides of the aggregation equation. He says adopting rules is more than just a way of protecting legacy franchises. “Increasingly, when people go online, it’s like stepping through the looking glass,” he said. “Whether you follow a link from Twitter, an e-mail, or Pinterest, you wind up on a site where you really don’t know where you are. It would be nice if there was a way of signaling what the standards are and how trustworthy the information is.” Page 2 of 2) Mr. Dumenco, who presented some of his ideas at a panel discussion this weekend in Austin, said the committee would grind its way to a set of standards and promulgate them over time. The group will have neither carrot nor stick, but could end up with a kind of Good Housekeeping seal, a signal that the consumer has landed on a site that adheres to a common industrial standard.

“We are not some tight little group of scolds,” he said. “This is a conversation that many people from all parts of the industry want to have, and this seemed like a good place to start.” On another panel in Austin, one in which I participated, Maria Popova, better known as brainpicker on Twitter, suggested that the failure to give credit was growing endemic. On Friday, she and her collaborator, the designer Kelli Anderson, announced the Curator’s Code, a site that offers a way of expressing where things come from. The Curator’s Code will use a symbol resembling a sideways S to express that a piece of content came directly from another source, and a different figure — a curved arrowlike symbol — to signal what is commonly known as a “hat tip,” or nod to a source that inspired a further thought. The Curator’s Code supplies the appropriate symbol and then the blogger or writer simply puts in a hyperlink behind it as they normally would. Ms. Popova, who spends hours a day scrounging the Web for remarkable artifacts, has noticed that many idiosyncratic discoveries suddenly become ubiquitous once unearthed. And the source of that little gem, or the credit for someone else who dug it up, often disappears when it is reposted. “Discovery of information is a form of intellectual labor,” she said. “When we don’t honor discovery, we are robbing somebody’s time and labor. The Curator’s Code is an attempt to solve some of that.” By creating a language signified by two so-called Unicode characters, they hope to make the business of attribution more standardized and routine. “What makes the Internet magical to me is that it is a place of radical discovery,” said Ms. Popova, who describes herself as a “curator of interestingness” on the Web. “You can click your way through a chain of attributes and links and find amazing things.” She is careful about attribution and thinks others should be mindful as well. The Curator’s Code is a shorthand tool to signify that on the Web, most things come from somewhere else. Neither of these initiatives seems intended to serve as a posse to bring justice and order to the digital Wild West. In a sense, they are an effort to bring back the promise of the consumer Internet, creating visible connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information. It’s called the Web for a reason, after all.

Righthaven, a copyright-troll law firm that failed in its attempt to make money for newspapers by suing readers for sharing stories online, was dealt a death blow on Tuesday by a federal judge who ordered the Las Vegas company to forfeit "all of" its intellectual property and other "intangible property" to settle its debts.

The order is an ironic twist to a copyright trolling saga that began in 2010, when Righthaven was formed with the idea of suing blogs and websites that re-post newspaper articles or snippets of them without permission.

U.S. District Judge Philip M. Pro of Nevada ordered Righthaven to surrender for auction the 278 copyrighted news articles that were the subject of its lawsuits.

"The copyright registrations to more than 275 works are in Righthaven’s name, can be transferred by this court, and can then be auctioned," the judge ruled. (.pdf)

The Righthaven.com domain was auctioned for $3,000 last year to help satisfy the legal bill the firm must pay to one of its defendants that prevailed in a copyright suit brought by Righthaven itself. The tab is more than $60,000 in the case before Judge Pro, and in total Righthaven owes about $200,000 to various defendants.

U.S. copyright law allows for massive damages — $150,000 per infringement — which leads many people to settle copyright cases, rather than risk a massive payout. But if someone does defend himself, the law allows the prevailing party in an infringement case to be awarded its legal fees and costs, even if it were the defendant.

Righthaven initially won and settled dozens of cases as defendants paid a few thousand dollars each to make the cases go away. But the firm, which has ceased filing new suits, has never prevailed in a case that was defended in court.

Ironically, Righthaven sought the domain names owned by the people it was suing as payment, and now it has lost its own domain name and any other available assets in the process. The company has threatened to file for bankruptcy protection.

The domain auction and the unscheduled auctioning of Righthaven’s copyrights is to help pay Las Vegas lawyer Marc Randazza for successfully defending Vietnam veteran Wayne Hoehn against a Righthaven copyright lawsuit seeking large damages for posting the entirety of a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial to a small online message board.

The lawsuit against Hoehn, one of hundreds of Righthaven’s lawsuits, accused him of unlawfully posting all 19 paragraphs of a November 2010 editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Hoehn posted the article, and its headline, "Public Employee Pensions: We Can’t Afford Them" on medjacksports.com to prompt discussion about the financial affairs of the nation.

Judge Pro ruled that the posting was fair use of the article, an issue that is on appeal. Whether Righthaven retains the financial wherewithal to litigate the appeal was not immediately known. Righthaven’s chief executive, Steve Gibson, did not immediately respond for comment.

Righthaven’s first client, Stephens Media of Las Vegas and operator of the Review-Journal, invested $500,000 into the Righthaven operation at its outset. With Judge Pro’s ruling, the media company is losing financial control of hundreds of articles and photos.

"The irony of this? Perhaps those who buy the copyrights could issue DMCA notices to the Review-Journal stopping them from redistributing them?" Randazza said via an e-mail, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

One of the things I try to accomplish with this forum is for it to become an easy to use research tool. A great concern is that when we go back to some URL we find it is no longer there. With the great tendency of inconvenient facts to disappear down the memory hole of the pravdas, (e.g. matters pertaining to Operation Fast & Furious) we who search for Truth cannot let this happen.

It’s not often that republishing an entire work without permission is deemed fair use. Fair use is an infringement defense when the defendant reproduced a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, commentary, teaching and research. The defense is analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

Monday’s ruling dismissed a lawsuit brought by Righthaven, a Las Vegas-based copyright litigation factory jointly owned with newspaper publisher Stephens Media. The venture’s litigation tactics and ethics are being questioned by several judges and attorneys, a factor that also weighed in on U.S. District Judge Philip Pro’s decision Monday.

Righthaven has sued more than 200 websites, bloggers and commenters for copyright infringement. More than 100 have settled out of court.

The lawsuit decided Monday targeted Wayne Hoehn, a Vietnam veteran who posted all 19 paragraphs of November editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which is owned by Stephens Media. Hoehn posted the article, and its headline, “Public Employee Pensions: We Can’t Afford Them” on medjacksports.com to prompt discussion about the financial affairs of the nation’s states. Hoehn was a user of the site, not an employee.

Righthaven sought up to $150,000, the maximum in damages allowed under the Copyright Act. Righthaven argued that the November posting reduced the number of eyeballs that would have visited the Review-Journal site to read the editorial.

“Righthaven did not present any evidence that the market for the work was harmed by Hoehn’s noncommercial use for the 40 days it appeared on the website. Accordingly, there is no genuine issue of material fact that Hoehn’s use of the work was fair and summary judgment is appropriate,” Judge Pro ruled.

Marc Randazza, one of Hoehn’s attorneys, said he would petition the judge for legal fees and costs.

The judge also said he took into consideration that only five of the editorial’s paragraphs were “purely creative opinions” of the author.

“While the work does have some creative or editorial elements, these elements are not enough to consider the work a purely ‘creative work’ in the realm of fictional stories, song lyrics, or Barbie dolls,” he wrote. “Accordingly, the work is not within ‘the core of intended copyright protection.’”

Judge Pro, in his fair-use analysis, also found that the posting was for noncommercial purposes, and was part of an “online discussion.”

That said, Pro did not need to decide the fair-use question.

That’s because he also found that Righthaven did not have legal standing to bring the lawsuit, a hot-button topic in the Righthaven litigation.

Pro’s decision came a week after a different Las Vegas federal judge threatened to sanction Righthaven, calling its litigation efforts “disingenuous, if not outright deceitful” when it came to standing. Standing is a legal concept that has enabled Righthaven to bring lawsuits on behalf of the copyrights owned by Stephens Media.

That blistering decision by U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt, the chief judge in Nevada, places into doubt Righthaven’s year-old business model, which is also under a Colorado federal judge’s microscope.

Hunt gave Righthaven two weeks to explain why he should not sanction it for trying to “manufacture standing.” Judge Hunt suggested Righthaven never had standing in any of its cases because Righthaven and Stephens Media had agreed to share the proceeds of any damages awards or settlements, yet Stephens Media kept ownership of the copyright.

Righthaven must own the copyright to sue on its behalf, Hunt ruled in a decision echoed by Judge Pro on Monday.

What’s more, in each of the 200-plus cases Righthaven brought on behalf of Las Vegas Review-Journal articles, Righthaven never disclosed, as required, that Stephens Media had a “pecuniary interest” in the outcome, Hunt wrote.

I can readily understand the desire of the SS to keep this knowledge off the grid. I might tangentially note that as a taxpayer I note that the extrordinary expenses of the extraordinary security required for Mexico. As a father-- especially if I were President!-- I would not be allowing my daughter to travel to Mexico. Surely the local authorities werever she may be must know, which is to say that there is a not insignificat risk of local narco operations knowing and launching a military level kidnap. As an American left realizing just how dark and cynical his doubts about this administration have become, I realize that it crosses my mind to note that her kidnapping would probably be used to justify our signing away our Second Amendment to the upcoming UN Small Arms Treaty.

And for the purposes of the copyright conversation of this thread, I note the proof hereof of the State's power, and the will to use that power, to disappear inconvenient truths.

A warm welcome to Russ, a.k.a. C-Bad Dog, who has posted on the China-South China Sea thread this morning. Russ is fluent in Mandarin and has recently returned to the US after living in China and Tibet for the last several years. There's much more (e.g. he's an attorney) but I will leave it to him to tell us about himself.

Before I moved to the Tibetan Plateau in 2009, I was living in Kunming, Yunnan, teaching International Law to international business majors from the EU, CH, North Africa, and China, of course! We also had a DBMA Kunming group, and Guro C. allowed me to represent DBMA for a seminar in Beijing in 2006.

Before that I was living in NYC, working as an attorney at a firm, and running Manhattan DBMA (2003-2006). While a law student, and intern at the San Diego DA's Office, I attended Guro Crafty's DBMA classes at Inosanto Academy in Marina Del Ray in 2001. I was also a student of Raw Dog's in NYC during this time (1999-2004), and taught DBMA classes at his school, Progressive Martial Arts Academy, after my certification by Guro Crafty as an Apprenctice Instructor in 2002.

Before China, I also lived in Japan (96-99') and Vietnam (95'/00'). Good times, and some interesting martial arts training there as well. Somehow I got coaxed into being the assistant coach of a high school Judo team. We had one real hot shot who could throw anyone, or pin them mercilessly to the mats. The training I had there stands up well in BJJ training much to many people's surprise (not to mention in real fighting). In Vietnam, we just learned "boobytraps."

My name is Stephen Browne, I'm 61 years old. I am first and foremost a father to two children Jerzy Waszyngton Browne, age 11, and Judyta Ilona Browne, age 6. Unfortunately a single father trying to do best by my kids.

My son's name is Polish, he was born in Warsaw two weeks after 9/11, which is how he came to be named "George Washington Browne."

My daughter is named for Jerzy's godmother, and her namesake, Judith Hatton, now sadly deceased, and a dear friend in Lithuania, Ilona Daukene, who died in the mushroom poisoning epidemic that hit northern Europe some years back.

Judith Hatton was an Englishwoman, the wife of a KGB agent (from SMERSH no less) who defected to the UK after WWII.

In the years 1991-2004 I lived in Poland, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Saudi Arabia, and traveled throughout Eastern Europe quite a lot. I was elected Honorary Member of the Yugoslav Movement for the Protection of Human Rights in 1997.

I returned to the States to get formal training in journalism after getting some really great stories as an amateur. I interviewed the wife of a murdered dissident in Belarus, and covered the election that brought down Milosevic from the streets of Belgrade.

I'm now paying my dues, starting from the bottom again and a rural daily newspaper in Minnesota.

I love the martial arts, but have not had the opportunity to train as much as I'd like, nor am I 25 anymore, but determined to "walk as a warrior all my days."

"I do recommend and assign Thursday ... next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be." --George Washington, 1789

My friend Donald was a roommate in college (my first one, Sarah Lawrence). We shared many Jefferson Airplance concerts together

We've reconnected through FB and have had some sidebar conversations about various political matters. He is a doctor now in MA and is a self-described "anti-abortion pro-gay marriage redistributor of wealth". Nonetheless his way of conducting himself in these conversations has persuaded me that he can be a good member of the forum here. He brings to health care issues an understanding of a doctor in the trenches every day and has shown himself to be someone who recognizes fair points on "the other side"-- a rare quality indeed.

He knows he is stepping into the lion's den here, but let's give him a warm greeting and a fair chance

My friend Donald was a roommate in college (my first one, Sarah Lawrence). We shared many Jefferson Airplance concerts together

We've reconnected through FB and have had some sidebar conversations about various political matters. He is a doctor now in MA and is a self-described "anti-abortion pro-gay marriage redistributor of wealth". Nonetheless his way of conducting himself in these conversations has persuaded me that he can be a good member of the forum here. He brings to health care issues an understanding of a doctor in the trenches every day and has shown himself to be someone who recognizes fair points on "the other side"-- a rare quality indeed.

He knows he is stepping into the lion's den here, but let's give him a warm greeting and a fair chance

A hearty welcome to my friend Walter. We first met at U. of PA back in the mid-70s and reconnected in the late 80s at the Inosanto Academy where we took Silat together and trained together outside the Academy as well. He even has a brief cameo in our Real Contact Stickfighting series. Amongst his athletic talents is a strong game of tennis.